Ruth, my comment wasn't directed so much at the post itself, but rather all the dripping fanboys posting in the comments. I'd wager that if they survive in this industry another 3 or 4 years there will posts about the things they are doing now being awful low quality black hat tactics. ;)

Formadan, the point is, you should not HAVE to. If a search engine wants to devalue the links from sites like that, they can. But to tell webmasters that they must actively go out and have those links removed to improve their ranking and link profile is the tipping point for negative SEO.

If Google says, your site will not recover until you remove these links over here, I, or anyone, can easily make it so you "NEVER" recover by going out and making more of those links for you without your knowledge or consent. As long as we make them faster than you can remove them, you lose.

It is easy enough for a search engine to saimply say this particular link style, directories, footers, blog rolls, in content, inforgrahic, widget, guest blogging, article sharing, anything, is no longer something that will help your website from this point forward. And from there we have a new guideline and we move forward knowing that some past effort is now devalued and that same effort in the future will never help. But asking webmasters to fix the algo by making them go out and remove links from the internet is simply silly.

First off, 20% seems to be about the statistical norm from what we have seen over the years when it comes to directories. I'm not seeing anything any different than we saw 4 or 5 years ago. Well other than people feeling incredibly self righteous about it.

There are days where I really wonder how people define 'ethical' behavior, or what is acceptable not acceptable. It always seems to be that most people define it as anything done before I ever got involved.

Remember when no one wore seatbelts? They didn't even put them in cars for a very long time.

What about using lead paint? Those people need to be locked for for doing that.

I even remember a time when they actually put real cocaine in coke a cola. *gasp*

Reciprocal links? (something google actually told us was okay and something you should do) Putting a link back to your website on a theme or template or website you designed?

Directories are no different. At one point in time it was aceptable, and common, to make them a fair part of a website's link building strategy. If directories are no longer en vogue, or a search engine has decided to reclassify them as not worth the effort, fine, we learn from that and move forward. But we do not point to that and go back a decade or more in many cases, and declare the people that did that evil black hats or unethical, or even misguided.

When you do that the next thing you know what you are doing today will get the same treatment and the next generation will be pointing at you and talking about your ethics.

And before people start jumping down my throat, I said "fair" part. I did not say 30,000 links from random directories all over the world, but a fair part of an over all link strategy.

I may just be getting old, but I'm getting tired of people taking every change and evolution as a reason to attack anyone and anything that came before them.

I think that this comes down to more of an issue of people choose to label themselves. From the very beginning I resisted the urge to jump on the band wagon and go from Internet Marketer to "SEO" when the first search engines started appearing. It made no sense to me that anyone would want to pigeonhole themselves in to just one small method of marketing a website.

Over the year we've seen people try to rename or redefine what they did, SEO, SMO, CRO, etc etc etc. All the while never really understanding that what they were doing was limiting themselves by using such narrow labels.

Now we see SEOs trying to break out of their chosen internal prisons becuase of what they did to themselves. Rather than try to 'clean up' the mess that they have made of the name SEO, they are choosing to try to rename it. Surprise, the name has been here all along, it's called internet marketing. And we've been here all along doing all the other jobs that SEOs either couldn't or wouldn't do.

So instead of trying to co-opt a term that has been used by telemarketers for more than a decade, why not come back to our real roots and join us old timers where you belong?

One of the hardest things to ficure out when I first got in to tech work 20 years ago was 'when' to raise my rates. I finally came up with a system that worked for me. When I was consistently billing out 30 hours a week my rates went up 10%. the increase applied to new clients immediately and old clients got a 6 month grandfather.

I was amazed at how fast my rate went up and as cheap peope fell off the bottom higher priced people were just waiting to take their spot. And the best part of it all, people that pay more repsect your time more. And are far less needy that cheap clients that seem to think they own all your time because they paid you $100 once 2 years ago.